Faith And Balancing A Checkbook

Today began with Qigong in Julliard Park with my favorite teacher and fellow students and something I said yes to this week.  One of the southern belles from Texas advised me to say yes to something and so I am hoping it might turn the tide for me.  I have no idea if it will and it seems like a long stretch though I understand what she meant.  Opening a door and stepping across the threshold is the stuff of life and saying yes can change the Qi.

One hopes and hopes when you are looking for a job and it can be exhausting riding those waves and having it come to nothing. If you have faith, unemployment tests it every day and if you don't, it makes you want to find some. For me, I said yes to balancing the checkbook of an elderly woman who lost her usual gal Friday.  Though it is not my specialty, I can easily do that for her.  The pay is very little and it doesn't help the sucking sound from my savings. I worry about money every day.  I worry about my inability to find a good job.  I sometimes feel like I am going nowhere fast and  I have lots of company.

However, I listened to the elderly woman's stories with genuine interest today, shuffled her mail and sorted it and balanced her checkbook.  My efforts helped her and by helping her perhaps I shifted the negative energy that seemed to overwhelm me this week.

I then stepped two apartments down and did some weeding for another woman who can no longer bend down to tend her garden.  She and her husband who died had many gardens and it is frustrating for her to see the weeds start to take over her small patch of flowers.  This too was a way to show kindness and hope to shift my focus on myself which always needs tending, like her garden.  I pull her weeds and talk with her as she sits nearby and I pull the weeds from my own tired and worrisome thoughts. 

My faith is sometimes threadbare and as I balance my own checkbook, I blanch at the shrinkage there.  I am unable to get recognized in the marketplace and though not alone, all I need, all anyone needs is one person to turn and pause and say yes.  What comes next, I cannot know.  Today, faith and balancing a checkbook were next door neighbors.